Mr. Bloomberg: Reducing class size and firing teachers.
Michael Bloomberg, the New York City Mayor gave a provocative speech at M.I.T. regarding to the education system of the city. He suggested that “in his ideal world he would fire half the city’s teachers and pay those remaining twice as much to teach classes double the current size”, but many people disagreed with his “ideal world”. For our class, we learned that by 1950s, the United States has the most skillful labor (the highest education level) among the world. This allowed the mass implementation of the latest technology to enhance the efficiency in industrial production, which set the stage for the country to excel in the future decades. The high education level is referred to high school graduation; so, it is a widely accepted concept that high school graduation is extremely important in a country’s development. Therefore, regardless of the economic situation, high school education should be promoted.
Mr. Bloomberg’s speech seems to contradict with this view; however, he gave this speech based on a survey that showed 18% of the surveyed teachers were rated “ineffective”. Bloomberg’s view was the education quality of the current high school system is too low, and should be promoted by raising salaries for high quality teachers and firing low quality teachers. But, I don’t think such policy can enhance the quality, because firing teachers would increase the teacher to student ratios, so the education quality would be lowered; unless, there will be hiring of new teachers of high quality.
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